This chapter investigates how a vocabulary for talking about body actions can emerge in a population of grounded autonomous agents instantiated as humanoid robots. The agents play a Posture Game in which the speaker asks the hearer to take on a certain posture. The speaker either signals success if the hearer indeed performs an action to achieve the posture or he shows the posture himself so th...

Traditional models describe the visual system as a general-purpose processor that analyzes all categories of visual images in the same manner. For example, David Marr (1982) in his classic text Vision described a single, hierarchical system that relies solely on visual processes to produce descriptions of the outside world from retina images. Similarly, Roger N Shepard (1984) understood the vis...

Patients with cortical blindness can reliably perceive some facial expressions even if they are unaware of their percept. We examined whether emotional body language may also be recognized in the absence of the primary visual cortex and without conscious stimulus perception. We presented emotional and neutral body images in the blind field of a patient with unilateral striate cortex damage. Usi...

People's faces show fear in many different circumstances. However, when people are terrified, as well as showing emotion, they run for cover. When we see a bodily expression of emotion, we immediately know what specific action is associated with a particular emotion, leaving little need for interpretation of the signal, as is the case for facial expressions. Research on emotional body language ...

209 Labanotation is widely known symbolic language for recording and describing human movement. Through the use of interactive computer graphics a Laban score can be described to the computer and a simulation of the movement viewed on a CRT in terms of a simple computer graphics model of a human form. The Laban score is entered by means of an acoustical tablet with visual feedback of the score ...